Mainstream G.O.P. Field of Three Faces Brutal Delegate Math

If the Republican Party remains divided for much longer, it will start getting more difficult for a mainstream candidate to win the nomination.

Yet Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich all have incentives to stay in the race, preventing the party from getting behind one candidate.

On Super Tuesday, March 1, 25 percent of the delegates to the Republican national convention will be awarded. If the mainstream field hasn’t been narrowed by that point, it will become very hard to avoid serious damage to the candidate who ultimately emerges as the party’s anointed favorite. The top mainstream candidate could easily fall more than 100 delegates short of what he might have earned in a winnowed field. He would even be in danger of earning no delegates at all in several of the largest states because of one number: 20 percent.

That’s the threshold for earning delegates in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Vermont, which combine to award 57 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday and 14 percent of all of the delegates in the Republican race. If candidates don’t get 20 percent of the vote, they get no delegates (unless they finish in the top two of a congressional district, in which case they get a delegate). Oklahoma and Arkansas, worth an additional 13 percent of Super Tuesday delegates, have a 15 percent threshold.

It is easy to imagine how none of the mainstream candidates pass this threshold. None reached 20 percent of the vote in New Hampshire; they’re failing to reach 20 percent in South Carolina polls; and they might fall short again on Super Tuesday if the field doesn’t narrow further.

Worse still for them, a quirk in the rules would send the delegates forfeited by the mainstream candidates straight to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. That’s because most Super Tuesday states allocate their statewide delegates proportionately among the candidates who clear the threshold for earning delegates; if only two do so, they will split all of the delegates awarded statewide. The rest of the delegates are generally awarded by congressional district — usually two to the winner and one to the second-place finisher, again most likely locking out an establishment candidate in third place.

The imperative to narrow the field quickly raises the stakes heading into South Carolina and Nevada, the last chance for voters to elevate one of the mainstream candidates before Super Tuesday.

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Supporters of Donald Trump in North Augusta, S.C., on Wednesday.CreditStephen B. Morton for The New York Times

The difference between falling short of the threshold in these seven states and clearing it, even if only barely, is approximately 70 delegates. It’s not enough to preclude a candidate like Mr. Rubio from winning the nomination. But it would require him to fare very well from that point on to finish with a majority of delegates; he might need as much as 70 percent of the outstanding delegates to win, a plausible figure given the party’s delegate rules but nonetheless a daunting one.

The delegate threshold challenge poses big questions for campaigns, which will have to choose between strategies that maximize delegates and those that maximize momentum. That’s because many of the conservative, Southern states where the mainstream candidates need to clear delegate thresholds on Super Tuesday aren’t necessarily the same states where they have the best chance to win.

Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia are all fairly conservative states where Mr. Trump or Mr. Cruz will be favored. Texas is also Mr. Cruz’s home state. The mainstream candidates might have a better shot to win in states like Virginia, Minnesota, Massachusetts or Colorado, where the delegate thresholds are lower (10 percent or less) or nonexistent.

The mainstream candidates are working out this calculus: Is it worth it for a campaign to spend millions for third place and 21 percent of the vote in Texas, which would yield many more delegates than third place and 19 percent? Or is it better to spend the money to win states like Massachusetts or Virginia, where the candidates are all but assured to win a modest number of delegates and won’t necessarily earn many more delegates by spending big to win?

The problem is greatest for the Rubio campaign, which would seem to have the potential to clear thresholds everywhere. But it has strong incentives to win races outright in order to help narrow the field quickly after Super Tuesday. The imperative to post victories on Super Tuesday could easily tempt Mr. Rubio’s team and its allies to focus on winning states, even at the risk of losing delegates in the South.

That cost wouldn’t be enough to prevent a candidate like Mr. Rubio from winning the nomination. The G.O.P.’s delegate rules and primaries calendar make it surprisingly easy for a candidate to make a big comeback after Super Tuesday: The states become more favorable to establishment-backed candidates, and the rules permit states to apportion more of their delegates to the winner.

Here’s an easy way to think about it: The potential loss of 70 delegates would be roughly equivalent to the delegates in a large winner-take-all state like Ohio (66). So a mainstream candidate can make up for his failures on Super Tuesday merely by winning a winner-take-all state that he might not have otherwise counted on.

That’s why the 70 delegates lost by falling short of the threshold is nothing to ignore, either. Assuming that Mr. Rubio, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump’s support roughly followed the demographic pattern from New Hampshire and Iowa, Mr. Rubio could win an outright majority of delegates if he won around 24 percent of the vote on Super Tuesday and then did as well as Mitt Romney in 2012 for the rest of the primary season.

The fact that Mr. Rubio has failed to do as well as Mr. Romney so far is reason to question whether he would be expected to do it later.